Belgium May Have New Appeal for Millennials: Join the Army and Sleep at Home

Many veterans and defense experts, however, are aghast, arguing that the policy could undermine unit cohesion and set a dangerous precedent for other Western armies. But many declined to go on the record with their criticism.

Danny Lams, a former Dutch paratrooper and chairman of a veterans’ organization, condemned the plans.

“You do not go to a war zone with men who miss their mama,” he told The Guardian. “We used to sleep on the cold ground under a leaky tarpaulin. We wanted to serve our country.”

“If you allow the recruits to go home during the week, the military will soon ask for a mobile home if they are sent to the front,” he added.

Belgium would be the first country in modern Western military history to make such a move, according to experts from the European Defense Agency, which monitors defense capabilities of European Union member states.

“Every army trains to go to war, and there will be no sleeping at home when you go to war,” said Vir Maram, 35, a reservist corporal of the French Foreign Legion who served several tours under the command of Western armies and NATO in Afghanistan, Iraq and Mali and who is studying international security in Brussels.

“An army evolves with the way that it fights,” he added, “but the only thing that changes are the weapons we fight with — the nature of war itself doesn’t change, and so the basic principles of the army don’t change.”

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Military service was mandatory in Belgium until 1994 for men turning 18 or ending their studies for one year. Since then, the head count of the country’s armed forces has gradually diminished, to about 28,500 active personnel from 40,000.

Belgium now has about 2.6 soldiers per 1,000 civilians, fewer than many of its NATO allies. And the average age has crept up.

“It’s almost like a Dad’s Army,” said Roger Housen, a retired colonel in the Belgian armed forces, referring to a television comedy about the British Home Guard, a World War II volunteer force made up of men exempt from conscription, often because they were considered too old to fight.

“The army is right to try to attract more youngsters, as many senior personnel will retire over the next five years,” Colonel Housen said. But the requirement to live in barracks, he said, was not the main factor driving young people away.

About 20 percent to 25 percent of recruits chose to end their contracts early, official army statistics show, but only 16 percent of those who leave say they do so because of “family reasons.”

More important, Colonel Housen said, was the effect of cuts in the Belgian defense budget over the past decades, which meant that “young people don’t have the appropriate equipment, they lack the means to train in a convenient way, they don’t have the right garrisons, the right training infrastructure, they don’t have the required readiness.”

“As a matter of fact, they can’t do the things they want to do, and the things they joined the armed forces for,” he added.

Mr. Claes, the army spokesman, said that a growing economy and increasingly lucrative civilian jobs for young people had kept many millennials away from the military. Others, he added, deem the prospect of patrolling the streets of Antwerp and Brussels under the country’s continuing counterterrorism operation, Vigilant Guardian, not adventurous enough.

Belgium’s military expenditure as a share of gross domestic product was 0.91 percent in 2017, down from almost 1 percent in 2010, the second-lowest proportion in NATO, after Luxembourg; NATO guidelines request 2 percent.

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About 1,000 Belgian troops are currently active abroad: Forty soldiers are stationed in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, and 100 others are training local forces in Mali. Every six months, six Belgian F-16 fighter jets take turns with Dutch warplanes to patrol the air space above Iraq and Syria and to carry out bombing raids against Islamic State targets. Belgian ships regularly take part in missions to control the international waters off the coast of Europe.

“Contributions to NATO operations are important,” said Oana Lungescu, the senior spokeswoman for NATO. “But so are defense spending and having the right capabilities.”

As for Mr. Maram, the Legionnaire, he said: “In the French Foreign Legion, we stay in the barracks for the first five years.”

“What do you want next, the army can go on strike? You want unions in the army?” he said, bursting into laughter. “How I hate the 21st century!”

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